Scott Manley writes:> What About the alphas? I was under the impression they were 64 bit> and Little Endian - there's already a 64bit linux which is little> endian.

Yes, and for alphas I malloc() and read() with byte swapping. It's notthat I can't support LE machines (I develop under Linux/x86, afterall), it's just that performance on LE machines is much lower than BEmachines where I can safely mmap(). Also, the LE machines require swapspace at least equal to the dataset size. When we're talking aboutdatasets in the gigabytes, this becomes a problem (especially ifmultiple users want to view the same dataset).

> And as for > > In the astronomy community, big-endian machines dominate> Armagh observatory hasn't got a single Big endian machine - 40 Linux> PC's and about 15 Alphas (abotu 10 running linux). Actually I> lie... I have a sparc 2 at home, and there's an IPC I've hooked up> to some old disks to serve some disks...